Posts for July 2009

You may have heard of something called a Let's Play video. These are videos on the Internet (typically YouTube) where someone plays through a game from start to finish, often providing commentary along the way.

I quite enjoy watching these videos. When done well, they can provide some nice added value to the game, and provide an opportunity to catch up on classic games that you never had the chance to play.

For quite some time now, I have harboured the plan to make a Let's Play of my own. Now, I have finally done so. The game I have chosen to play is Riven: The Sequel to Myst. This is my favourite game of the Myst series, and perhaps my favourite game of all time. Its level of depth and immersion is unparalleled by anything else I've seen, and because I know a great deal about the world of the Myst games it presented an ideal target for a Let's Play.

The first video of the series is embedded below:

Today, I have finally uploaded the final video of the 32-part series. The whole thing was recorded in a single weekend, and uploaded one by one over the period of two weeks.

Windows 7 is about to hit RTM, and many of you might want to verify that the ISO image you downloaded hasn't been tampered with or was damaged as the result of some error in the download process. Of course you can use existing checksum tools and compare the result to published values, but it can be a bit of a hassle.

At the request of Long Zheng I created a small application that makes this process easier. Simply drag and drop your ISO file onto the application (or start the application and browse to the ISO file) and it will verify the EXE and tell you which build you have from a list of known builds. It downloads this list from the web automatically, so you don't need to re-download the application after Windows 7 RTM is released.